3D Printing Meets Stone Age Tools!

About a million years ago, stone and flint tools were the primary means of survival for our pre-historic ancestors. These tools enabled early man to project and magnify his physical abilites using a variety of cutting, sawing and pounding surfaces.

Ami Drach and Dov Ganchrow are lecturers at the world-famous Bezalel Academy of Art and Design. As product designers they are also fascinated by the idea of marrying thousand-year-old cutting implements with modern day, cutting edge design and manufacturing technologies. In 1996, Ami and Dov opened their own design studio. Woking together they have accrued an astonishing number of prestigious awards, collections and patents and have exhibited at world-famous venues including London, Milan, Paris and Brussels.

The following photos and pictures were taken from their BC - AD project, an experimental exploration into the fields of design and pre-historic tool making.

This project takes real thousand-year-old stone and flint tools and scans them three-dimensionally. With the digital files on screen it's then possible to design custom-made, precisely fitting handles. The final step is to print the handle designs into life on an Objet 3D printer and fit them exactly to the stones to create the completed tools..

Thanks to Ami and Dov for these great images, photographed by Moti Fishbain.

This is of course, not the first time that 3D printing has been used for pre-historic modelling. Paleoanthropologist Eric Delson uses the Objet Eden 3D printer at the Lehman College in New York to produce models of ancient primate skeletons. 3D printing allows him to make accurate replicas without damaging the originals and to generate larger versions of fossils that can be safely handled by the public.